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Monday, September 10, 2018

James Review -- Kris Longknife: Commanding

This week I decided to review Kris Longknife: Commanding by
Mike Shepherd.

The story begins with the execution of the rebel leaders
captured at the end of the previous book. Kris Longknife then shifts her
attention to the ongoing Iteeche civil war. Even as
she struggles to recruit new ships for her fleet and training crews, she also
works to find a way to minimize bloodshed in a culture where civil wars have
led to the mass slaughter of civilians for thousands of years. She must also
find ways to change many other traditions and attitudes that have stood for ten
millennia.

After laying her plans, she launches an attack on Zargoth,
the system that served as the staging area for the recent rebel attack on the
Imperial capital. After easily securing space around the rebel world, she sends
her aide and distant relative Megan Longknife to launch an operation against
the bunkers used by the world’s leadership. After defeating the various
security measures and eliminating the rebel leadership, efforts to secure the
world and rebuild its infrastructure begin, but soon the efforts face sabotage
from rebel loyalists that threaten to leave millions of Iteeche civilians
without access to food supplies and basic services.

After Zargoth is secure, the combined Human/Imperial loyalist
fleet moves on to their objective: an assault aimed as the first strike of a campaign
against the rebellion’s major battlecruiser production centers. The offensive
begins with an attack against the production center furthest from the imperial
capital, but rather than finding the hoped-for lightly guarded system, Longknife’s
fleet finds itself facing thousands of rebel warships…

I give this book 9 out of 10. The climatic battle was great.
Also, I greatly enjoyed the deeper look into Iteeche culture and how it
affected, aka hindered, their military as well as a peek into the mindset of
some of the rebels. My main issue is that the look into the rebel point of view
came too late. Basically, for the most part, you only see points of view for
rebel characters in the final battle, and I feel adding some more into the
Zargoth sequence would have been very interesting.